Trump and Kim declare summit a big success, but diverge on the details

North Koreans read newspaper reports about Tuesday's historic summit between Donald Trump and their own leader.
Minoru Iwasaki

by
Karen DeYoung and John Wagner

President Donald Trump and North Korea's Kim Jong Un agreed this week that their Singapore summit had been a momentous and unqualified success, but offered somewhat differing versions of what they had accomplished and where they go from here.

Trump, in tweets that began as Air Force One made an early-morning landing, declared America's "biggest and most dangerous problem" all but resolved. The "deal" he struck with Kim, he said, meant there was "no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea", and "everybody can now feel much safer".

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the administration expected "major disarmament" by North Korea before the end of Trump's first term.

Kim, or at least his country's state-run news agency, said the two leaders had decided to end "extreme hostile relations" and described the beginning of a "step-by-step and simultaneous" process that would eventually lead to peace and "denuclearisation of the Korean Peninsula".

Donald Trump, in tweets that began as Air Force One made an early-morning landing, declared America's "biggest and most dangerous problem" all but resolved.
Kevin Lim

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Unlike Kim, whose government brooks no domestic disagreement or questions, Trump faced scepticism that one day of talks had achieved so much. His all-is-resolved description seemed to fly in the face of decades of hostility, unkept promises, and the widespread belief, shared by US intelligence agencies, that North Korea would never give up the nuclear weapons it sought for so long.

The meeting clearly brought a step back from the brink of war, which Trump himself had threatened. Uneasiness in Washington stemmed largely from his lavish praise of Kim as "a very talented man" with a "great personality"; the choreographed, feel-good optics of the summit; and the striking lack of details in the brief declaration the two leaders signed.

Pompeo, visiting Seoul as part of a tour to brief regional governments on the summit, told reporters that questions about verification of North Korean denuclearisation and its irreversibility - neither of which was mentioned in the document - were "insulting and ridiculous and frankly ludicrous".

Referring to his own extensive pre-summit communications with North Korea and the meeting itself, Pompeo said he would not talk about "discussions between the two parties". But he was confident, he said, that the North Koreans "understand what we're prepared to do, and [the] handful of things we're not likely to do".

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the administration expected "major disarmament" by North Korea before the end of Trump's first term.
Andrew Harrer

"Not all of that work appeared in the final document," Pompeo said. "But lots of other places where there were understandings reached, we couldn't reduce them to writing." He said those understandings would provide a starting point when detailed negotiations begin.

Those talks, which he is to lead, would start "some time in the next week or so", Pompeo said, and would be completed, "most definitely", within the next two years. He said he had already assembled a strong negotiating team.

House Speaker Paul Ryan said Trump deserved credit for taking a new approach on a foreign policy challenge that has bedevilled past presidents.

"The status quo was not working with North Korea," Ryan told reporters on Capitol Hill. "The president should be applauded for disrupting the status quo."

Ryan said that he was "encouraged" by continued negotiations on denuclearisation led by Pompeo. At the same time, he said, there was no question that North Korea was a "terrible regime" and "we should be under no delusions that this will be fast".

Democrats and some analysts were more directly negative in their assessments.

"What planet is the president on?" Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said during remarks on the Senate floor. "Saying it doesn't make it so. North Korea still has nuclear weapons. It still has ICBMs. It still has the United States in danger. Somehow President Trump thinks when he says something it becomes reality, if it were only that easy, only that simple."

Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, said "the summit changed nothing."

"Worse yet, overselling the summit makes it harder to keep sanctions in place, further reducing pressure on NK to reduce 9much less give up) its nuclear weapons and missiles," Haass said on Twitter.